Just home from some of the gentlest holiday travels I have known—time with family and friends, connecting around food and games and sweet conversation. And yesterday as I was flying home from a Connecticut visit with a friend and the pilot reduced altitude for landing, I watched from my windowed seat as the fields and curves below me shifted from the appearance of a two dimensional topographical map to the earth-bound realities of texture and depth—the realities of landscape we experience in close proximity. Both dimensions hold truth. With proximity, we understand a beauty of form and shape that nature has painstakingly created across life and time. And from great distances where all appears insignificant, there is hope in the unfolding of universal meaning that has been at work for billions of years. We are all so beautifully and wonderfully small.

I am drawn to humble people. And by slow degree, I am coming to understand the gift that is theirs; any genuine humility precludes ego attachments that crush meaningful human connection, so sharing space with the humble is inevitably intimate, free of the vices of the competitive—free of the noose of the superiority complex and its accompanying devices of shame, blame, and false authority. I should know, having plenty of that business swirling around in my head space.

And I’m not alone. I’m relatively certain my complex assigns me to one giant-ass majority in this world. One need only scroll Facebook for ten seconds to understand how entrenched we all are in the foibles of righteous rightness. I’m just grateful that my human package came with a reflective rearview that helps me catch glimpses of my own arrogant platitudes and wish for the pill to make it go away. Big Pharma won’t make that one—there’s no profit at the end of it. In fact, I’m convinced that one reason authentic humility is so seldom seen in the world is because it’s an attribute that belongs to the most secure among us; those whose confidence exists not in being brilliant or beautiful or right, but in the mere condition of being. Marketing doesn’t get very far with the type. The profiteers of the land need make us insecure… about the color of our teeth or hair, the condition of our estates and entitlements (aka race, sexuality, gender), the status of our employment, and those with whom we hobnob and kowtow. That’s the stuff of big bucks.

Unfortunately, however, that group of deeply secure, humble-minded humanity is so small that if I reduced my friend list to its members, I’m afraid I’d find myself one lonely gal. Hell, I wouldn’t make the cut myself, and it seems something of an imperative that I navigate this world as my own best friend. I think what is true, however, is that there are a whole bunch of people who lean humble—sort of like leaning left or right in the political arena—and I’ve been blessed to know some of them on pretty intimate terms. They’re the people for whom knowing them at ten years old and thirty is considerably different from knowing them at forty and fifty… or fifty-six. They are the people who change.

Many years ago, in the early 90s, my little sister was divorcing. Mom and Dad were beside themselves with grief and embarrassment. Raised in the South with the values of permanence, they couldn’t imagine why AJ wouldn’t just “stand by her man,” for better or worse. It’s what they had done—the stuff of vows and the promises we make when we have no idea who we are or where we’re going or if we can go there together. I found myself in the very awkward position of long telephone conversations between Denver and San Antonio, Denver and NYC, mediating my parents’ concerns with Little Sis’s right to make her own decisions. Growing up the pleaser in the family, nothing could have felt more foreign than to say to my parents, “Amy gets to decide.” It was an outright betrayal of my role. Everybody’s supposed to leave with their cookies, secure in their positions. That’s my job.

And it wasn’t gonna happen.

So you can imagine my consternation some fifteen years after all those long conversations, cuffed by phone cords attached to walls—fifteen years later when I was announcing my own divorce. I waited till every document was signed before finally making the call, and holding my breath, I waited for the lecture, the disappointment, the reinforcement of all the failure I was certain was mine. It didn’t happen. Instead, “Jan, we just want you to be happy.” Then seven years later when I was coming out to them, I lived the same fear all over again, and again the response, “We know, and we love you.” Put those words in the mouth of a man (my dad) who’d said to me in 1988 that AIDS was God’s condemnation of the gays, and tell me that people don’t change. Humility alone makes change possible—naught but those who can say Maybe I don’t have the corner on right can make such an about face. What a birthright is mine.

To be sure, my 81 and 82-year-old Trump-loving, FOX News-watching parents are going to go to their graves voting against the interests of their second daughter whom I know they love. And I’m really ok with that. I’m not giving up the arguments of my politics, but I know that the fabric of life and change pre-dates this moment by billions of years and weaves intricate and subtle patterns, and in one way or another, it will correct and uncorrect and correct again after I am gone. Not a reason to do nothing, but a good enough reason to err on the side of love and compassion and humility.

Humility doesn’t come easily to me. “Right” and “best” are powerful distractors to a fragile ego. And oh so characteristically, this week after losing four Scrabble games in a row to my friend in CT, my ego warped into contempt for the game gods responsible for the crappy letters I was drawing (couldn’t possibly be that my opponent was simply playing better). But by the fifth loss, I began to smile again. In its friendly, playful way, I suspect the Universe was chuckling at my pissy response and my long path toward humility, a path that I requested. Darlin’, you think a Scrabble loss is hard?

Here’s to the change we all want and need, to the burning away of hate and anger, righteous though we may believe it to be.

I have been a happy Costco shopper for many years. In fact, I shudder to think the dollar numbers I’ve sunk into your corporation. So much so that when I once complained about a pair of broken glasses for which I was initially denied repair, the attendant retracted his critique after he looked into the available data base and saw my contributions (high by middle class standards only, though I’m sure the number would embarrass me). And beyond the great prices and the local and fair trade dealers that visit for a week here and a week there, I love the diversity of the Costco team and how happy they all seem. I’ve probably entered a Walmart less than five times in ten years, but those five times laid aside the gazillion Costco entries spoke worlds to me about the ways employees are treated. I am grateful.

But Costco is a lesson to me in the slow boiling frog that corporate capitalism represents. As a consumer, it would be so easy to continue justifying my shopping habits: savings for me and my family, happy employees, the appearance of progressive values. However, as I’ve learned more about mass incarceration in this country, its impact on communities of color, and the laws that keep prisons profitable for businesses and shareholders, I know that I can no longer support any business that profits on the backs of inmates. According to the “Supplier Code of Conduct,” Costco… Prohibits slave labor, human trafficking, illegal child labor, illegal prison labor… In other words, the company would have us believe that because it does not utilize illegal child labor or illegal prison labor then it has some sort of moral high ground; but I think most critical thinkers in this country and around the world understand that laws are written on behalf of the profiteers. So to use law as a standard of morality is a propagandized manipulation and a distraction. In fact, Costco’s utilization of legal prison labor only incentivizes mass incarceration in this country which currently houses a prison population 4.5 times larger than that in 1980. Not only does Costco not have a moral high ground, but its beneficiaries are complicit in exploiting some of our most vulnerable citizens for profit. And it’s interesting to me that when I first started shopping at Costco, the CEO (and founder?) made somewhere around 350K in salary, if I remember correctly. It’s a lot, but not by corporate CEO standards. However, the last research I unearthed told a different story: the new numbers for the current CEO are a compensation package in excess of 6.5 million dollars. I can only infer that your rewards, Mr. Jelinek, are a result of serving shareholder interests in direct conflict with the human kind.

I have so wallowed in the Costco shopping experience–the samples, the one-week-only traveling vendors, the spring flowers–and I hope you’ll let me know just as soon as you decide to stop utilizing child and prison labor by any name, legal or illegal (I don’t want to think about what legal child labor means to products on Costco shelves). But until that time, I’ve decided that if I can’t afford products where people are treated fairly and humanely, then I can’t afford them; the world cannot afford them.

I have discontinued my Costco membership.

Sincerely,

(Your Name Here)

See the documentary, 13th, based upon the 13th Amendment loophole legalizing prison slavery.

]]>https://mothlit.wordpress.com/2018/09/02/labor-by-the-name-of-legal-slavery/feed/0mothlitProfit or the Greater Goodhttps://mothlit.wordpress.com/2018/08/19/profit-or-the-greater-good/
https://mothlit.wordpress.com/2018/08/19/profit-or-the-greater-good/#respondMon, 20 Aug 2018 02:10:57 +0000http://mothlit.wordpress.com/?p=656Continue reading →]]>The questions that we have to ask and to answer about that procession during this moment of transition are so important that they may well change the lives of men and women forever. For we have to ask ourselves, here and now, do we wish to join that procession, or don’t we? On what terms shall we join that procession? Above all, where is it leading us, the procession of educated men? …Let us never cease from thinking—what is this “civilisation” in which we find ourselves? What are these ceremonies and why should we take part in them? What are these professions and why should we make money out of them? Where in short is it leading us, the procession of the sons of educated men?

Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, 1938

I’ve said before that Virginia Woolf was my introduction to feminist thought. As a young adolescent, I entertained questions about power and authority—who had it and why—but it was Virginia who shaped those questions into a mental image of the workings of power in a capitalist world in which players seek their next opportunity to capitalize and what that means to the vast majority of those capitalized upon. The quote above comes from her essay, Three Guineas, through which she challenged readers to re-think educating the populace from the perspective of the top rung of the social hierarchy, that is, the sons of educated men, and their values of acquisition and domination. She advocated, instead, for a humanistic approach to our relationships both at micro and macro levels. As a woman, she was not allowed admittance to a university, so she was self-educated, which, ironically, might have offered her a much broader vision of the world than a university education at the time. I don’t think there was an entity like the Koch Brothers gobbling up critical thinking by “donating” to universities with the caveat that the Brothers control hiring (and free market “professors”), but social expectation is its own pervasive manipulation of content. Whatever it was that Virginia learned and observed in her day that guided her pen (and we know it was bad), I shudder to think what she would be writing today. In fact, most recently I’ve been wondering a lot about Jesus’ words, “… the poor will always be with you,” and thinking it might be time to concede, throw in the towel, live the remaining 30% of my life putzing with the lavender in my garden, writing poetry about ladybugs and rain drops, and experimenting with the virtues of sweet potato pancakes.

Dilemma: it isn’t in me to concede–at least, not until I know I’m wrong. And really, Jesus was a social justice warrior who upset the social order, and, as with all fake news, removing context is expedient for thoughtless decision-making.

So onward ho. For the purposes of this brief little treatise, I want to look at that final question Virginia posed but replace the language with something more accessible in the 21st century. My revision is this: Where in short is it leading us, the manipulations of the capitalist profiteers and the politicians they purchase?

Here’s some recent history of just a few of those destinations: In the 80s, government begins privatizing prisons (later, detention centers), doling out tax dollars by the prisoner (and profit to shareholders), and in so doing incentivizes mass incarceration over any meaningful reform–our brown brothers and sisters pay the highest price because they remain invisible to white power structures except as fodder for profit; within those prisons, corporations like Starbucks and Costco utilize a cheap labor source for their packaging in order to keep profits soaring (slavery by a different name); trade agreements like NAFTA allow U.S. corporate farmers to dump their tax-payer-subsidized (cheap) crops in Mexico, forcing Mexican farmers out of business and across the border where they are now profit potential for privatized detention centers; in 2008, the housing market crashes and the government saves the banks which, in turn, reward their chief executives with millions of dollars in bonuses while nearly a million people lose their homes in foreclosure; Big Pharma sets the price for an epi-pen at $600 (production cost is $1), deaths be damned, and a CEO’s salary bullets from about 2.5 million in 2007 to around 19 million in 2015; in 2016, the federal government ignores the plight of the Standing Rock Sioux, holding out for Big Oil and the pipeline that will decimate tribal lands and endanger water sources–Donald Trump slams the last nail in the coffin at the start of his term; and, as I said above, the likes of the Koch Brothers (and a number of other billionaires, Dems and Reps alike) have now infiltrated both K-12 and higher ed by purchasing legislation that starves those institutions of resources which, in turn, allows them to capitalize on desperation.

I could go on and on, and I’m sure you could, too, but I’d like to get to the point (if it isn’t obvious) and something that hits a little closer to home.

The point is this: capitalism doesn’t often serve the interests of the greater good. By definition, it can’t… or, at least, not for long and not for many. Investor profits must always be increasing which necessitates a constant shift in the configuration of pawns. Where can we find cheaper labor? Or get rid of it altogether? Which people are desperate enough that they’ll pay any price for their medications? How about move our factory to a different country? How much could we get for a prisoner, student, illegal immigrant…? What if we refused services when… ? What if we reduced services? How could we incarcerate them longer? What if we sell stuff to people who can’t really afford it? Wouldn’t computers be cheaper than teachers? And more profitable to Big Tech?

To those who’ve already begun saying to yourselves, But capitalism is the birthplace of innovation, and filtering through examples of inventions that have improved the human experience, I would argue that it is necessity–not money–that inspires change and invention. Does anyone really believe that we wouldn’t have penicillin, or wheels, or computers unless someone was making a buck? Perhaps in a world where our value is established by titles and possessions it’s easy to be lured by such propaganda.

And look at the institutions implicated above: government, medicine, criminal justice, banking, housing, education. Each one of those institutions was established for the purpose of serving humanity, but as legislation turns them into profit machines, corners are cut, prices jacked, loopholes created, inequality fueled, lives and livelihoods lost… all in the interest of moneys flowing to a limited few. In short, people relying on those institutions are screwed because profit occurs either in the reduction of resources people need to thrive or in the funneling of lives and resources to profiteering hands.

So finally to the local issue: my tiny little school district in Commerce City, Colorado. Ours is a district that serves a predominantly underprivileged population and one that is ripe with years of problems that are many and layered. Corruption, nepotism, absurd levels of turnover, flagrant incompetence of leadership… it’s all there. And as the destabilization of the district mounts, little surprise that the sharks of privatization have progressed beyond circling, and are now moving in for the kill. Friends and colleagues rightfully ask, How could a charter school possibly be worse, and isn’t there a chance it could be better? Maybe. But at what price and for how long?

Perhaps we should think about the beginnings of destabilization and the lies upon which profit soars in education. Standardized testing ushered in a new philosophy of education requiring teachers to ignore that which we cannot control—things like poverty, even homelessness, racial inequality, and job prospects. The whole world could look at the statistics coming out of schools and figure out that, of course, poverty matters; but as the federal government chose plans that would serve profit over children, they established penalties for failing test scores, propagandized on the backs of those greedy teachers, and all resources began flowing to an end of high stakes, standardized tests. The test-makers kept moving the mark and changing the test, legislators reduced funding over and over again, and ultimately, the schools serving the most vulnerable students “failed.” The designs of both Race to the Top and its predecessor, No Child Left Behind, were statistically impossible failure designs meant to serve corporate interests. Charters moved in as part of the privatization plan, and mostly, they failed, too, but the laws written by the profiteers offer them a different kind of protection. So here charters have served as the threat that defines (in part, at least) the “high stakes” of standardized testing, and then they benefit from the destabilization that ensues from the threats and penalties they represent. Are we to believe that the top level beneficiaries of that system care deeply about the education of children? I would imagine they care about as much as, say, Corrections Corporations of America (beneficiary of privatized prisons and detention centers) cares about prisoners and immigrants. And once those profiteers have finished destroying traditional public ed with the help of state boards and departments (they’re all complicit), once they’ve pit teachers against teachers and parents against teachers in a propaganda war, what’s next? What prices above market value will taxpayers be footing to rent buildings from charter management partners? What cuts to resources? Salaries to executives? Incentives to hedgefunders? With capitalism, the end is always and forever profit. Humanity is negotiable.

Yes, Commerce City Friends… for the sake of our kids, we have to change the way we operate. But I’ll ask Virginia’s question again… Where is it leading us, the manipulations of the capitalist profiteers and the politicians they purchase?

There has to be another way.

]]>https://mothlit.wordpress.com/2018/08/19/profit-or-the-greater-good/feed/0mothlitSnakes and Hawks, Part 1https://mothlit.wordpress.com/2018/04/08/snakes-and-hawks-part-1/
https://mothlit.wordpress.com/2018/04/08/snakes-and-hawks-part-1/#respondSun, 08 Apr 2018 17:23:56 +0000http://mothlit.wordpress.com/?p=649Continue reading →]]>Inevitably, in one form or another, a student in every class asks the question: “Miss, were you a hippie?” It’s a question that floats on their internalized images of the type–all flower-loving nonviolence–and the readings that hold sway in our content–readings by Michelle Alexander and Angela Davis detailing the human poisons of the privatized prison industry, articles about resource wars in Africa, about housing toxins and educational disparities. I sense their disappointment when I tell them that I came of adolescence after the hippie years under Jimmy Carter. Vietnam had passed; Jimmy Carter was kind. The hippies had a crisis of relevance.

“Well, then, have you ever hit anybody?” It is a related question.

“No, but almost… once.”

The gymnasium of Youree Drive Junior High School in Shreveport, Louisiana was aflutter with four nets, sixteen girls swatting badmintons back and forth. Others waited in the wooden bleachers for their opportunity at the net, each student, floor and bleacher, clothed in an unflattering onesie—a flimsy knit number, light blue shorts separated from a blousy blue and white striped tank by a drawstring at the waist. To any visiting, it gave the illusion of unity and pride, a team of young girls committed to the tenets of cooperative play and healthy movement. It was a lie, of course.

I was on the floor, racket in hand, and at some juncture between points earned, a classmate came toward me from the bleachers, demanding that she and her friends receive the equipment after we’d finished our match.

Treating the request as I would any other, I looked at her and said simply and matter-of-factly, “I’m sorry, we’ve already promised the rackets to someone else.”

There was a pause, a piercing glare, before my able-bodied classmate flew at me with balled fists. She hadn’t intended to hit me, but I ducked at a speed that mirrored hers, eliciting a raucous laughter of surprised appreciation from her friends in the bleachers. THAT was the intent, and one that would continue as she positioned herself, in the days that followed, for pushes and bumps and sneers accompanied by a single monosyllabic elongated slight: Girrrrrl. At this point in history there were no hotlines or prevention programs or tell-the-teacher mandates (I wouldn’t dream of it), and I knew that if this humiliation was to end, I would have to take matters into my own hands.

In class, I studied her from my bleachered seat, not so much the way a boxer studies the moves of her opponent as the way a snake observes the habits of a hawk. She wasn’t small but lean–chiseled into a muscular defiance, her coordination and athletic prowess far exceeding any of my own efforts for which the highest achievable accolade was a respectable attempt. I imagined the fight and wondered how long it might be before the teacher rescued me. Would the audience cheer us? Would I be suspended? Would my teacher think me the instigator? Was I?

The day came, and I didn’t have to wait long; P.E. was second period. We were returning to the locker room after court play, and the crowded spaces were abuzz with girls chatting, picking up the wire baskets that housed the street clothes we’d arrived in. It was there, in front of the wall of baskets that she pushed me from behind and teased, predictably, “Girrrrl.” Stifling the fear pounding through my body, I turned to meet the intensity of her gaze with my own, and with a feigned confidence, I punctuated the words, “You best not do that again.” She did it again. I repeated with greater urgency, “I said, you BEST not do that again.” Stone-faced, she lifted her fists to her chest. I duplicated her behavior and a circle of girls formed around us. They were quiet, without cheers, as we two held each other’s unflinching attention in coiled preparation. It could be that our silent audience sensed my peril and felt pity. Perhaps they wondered about irreparable damage. I had wondered no less. But what hadn’t occurred to me in all my imaginings of this scene, was that the girl I deemed predator would lower her fists as slowly as she had raised them, turn around, and never touch me again.

Across twenty-five years of a teaching history, students have heard the story. They ooooo and ahhhh in just the right places and feel satisfied that their teacher once stood up to a bully in her junior high locker room. But there’s an omission from the story that only one class has ever heard: the classmate who stood in front of me with balled fists and the anger of centuries was black. It is a calculated omission on my part, as relatable to time and history as the inherited confusions governing the behaviors of each girl, each color. The only class ever to know a fuller truth was a middle school classroom in the only school I ever taught with a sizable black population. In that classroom, when I finished the story, Jaimie, an insightful black student, more comfortable with questions than answers and enough knowledge of time and place to infer a few missing details, said simply, “She was black, wasn’t she, Ms. C.?”

The story of that near fight, and a decades-long tradition of fearful silence, sits atop another—many, actually, though most of them largely hidden to me at the time, stories that I was destined by birthright to ignore and misunderstand, stories slowly revealing themselves over years of reading and observing, snakes morphing into hawks, hawks into snakes…

]]>https://mothlit.wordpress.com/2018/04/08/snakes-and-hawks-part-1/feed/0mothlitCharity, 2018https://mothlit.wordpress.com/2018/01/01/charity-2018/
https://mothlit.wordpress.com/2018/01/01/charity-2018/#commentsMon, 01 Jan 2018 10:38:12 +0000http://mothlit.wordpress.com/?p=631Continue reading →]]>It is December 31, 2017. I spent a little of this afternoon studying charities—their impact, alignment with my values, efficiency ratings, etc.—ultimately deciding on those that I would make part of my monthly giving for 2018. Final vote went for International Rescue Committee, Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition (CCJRC), Charity: Water, African Library Project, and Words Beyond Bars.

There are tons of noteworthy charities and nothing particularly noble about the ones I’ve chosen—at least not in comparison to anyone else’s list; we’re all doing what we can and what makes the most sense to us. What is more interesting to me than the list itself, is the disposition through which I’ve entered a relationship with any of the organizations. A couple were simply a friend’s touch of a “like” button on Facebook. Charity: Water and International Rescue Committee came to me, initially, as curiosities in my Facebook feed. What’s important to my friend who “liked” this? Then, following the links and the stories, I learned about powerful organizations through which people in need of clean water, people in need of hope in the face of the most extreme violence and loss, find health, safety, and possibility.

In the case of CCJRC, my co-teacher and I were developing a 9th grade literature unit around the short story, “The Most Dangerous Game” by Richard Connell. We wrote guiding questions related to themes of human predator-prey relationships as they exist in American society and explored related current events. Unchecked capitalism is predatorial by definition, so it wasn’t a hard climb, but we hoped to find something local that our students would be more likely to understand and engage with. In one of our morning planning sessions, my sweet friend and colleague said to me, “Look what I found last night.” It was the CCJRC website that offered us statistics on criminal justice and its profiteering implications in Colorado. But the site didn’t stop with the ugliness of human exploitation; it offered a story of compassion and refuge as the organization sought to restore dignity and humanity to ex-convicts through various structures and resources.

Then the African Library Project that has my little sister’s fingerprints all over it… Since serving as a Peace Corp volunteer in Lesotho, she’s been part of a system that organizes libraries for readers across Africa, placing books in the hands of students of all ages who would otherwise have sparse opportunities for connecting with the written word. In 2011, she recruited me… then I recruited my students and administration through which we collected a whole bunch of books that we combined with a collection my older sister obtained through her church, and, together, we made a complete library. Elder sis and Mom braved blizzardous conditions in December of that year, driving from Texas to Colorado to pick up the books then back to my brother-in-law who drove the books on to New Orleans, the shipping site.

Between family and friends and the creators of each organization, it was a collaborative spirit of love and compassion that gave birth to these amazing connections and opportunities to participate in the humanity of those both near and very far away. And participating in theirs, I find inroads to my own. But nowhere did I find myself in the strength and fragility of another human being more profoundly than when I was invited to a “Write Night” hosted by a sweet friend and mentor.

In her home, a group of women met the founder of Words Beyond Bars, Karen Lausa, who spoke humbly and passionately about the work of the organization that brings inmates together around book readings and discussions, around poetry and the creative freedom represented in the form. Our work for the night, beyond listening and learning, was responding to the poetry the inmates themselves had written, inmates likely to spend most of their lives incarcerated. It was a strangely intimate connection to the writers, devoid of eye contact, where we experienced voices that rang humorous and tender and hopeful. And when asked our thoughts at the end of it all, I could offer only, “It could be me.”

Born to different parents in a different body in a different time and place, I am Eric Garner and the police officers who killed him; I am the police officer who lost his life in the line of duty and the domestic abuser who shot him; I am Harvey Weinstein and the women he exploited; I am a Syrian and Myanmar and Afghanistan refugee and I am the perpetrators of violence against them; I am Donald Trump.

There is no us and them–there is only us and us.

So what am I to do? How do I respond to the ugliness of this world with the understanding that any of its representations could be me?

I’m reading a book, The Seat of the Soul. Writer, Gary Zukav, says this: “Understanding evil as the absence of Light does not require you to disregard evil actions or evil behavior. If you see a child being abused, or a people being oppressed, for example, it is appropriate that you do what you can to protect the child, or to aid the people, but if there is not compassion in your heart also for those who abuse and oppress—for those who have no compassion—do you not become like them? Compassion is being moved to and by acts of the heart, to and by the energy of love. If you strike without compassion against the darkness, you yourself enter the darkness.”

And Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Let no man pull you so low as to hate him.”

So as the cacophony of fireworks and car horns and human cheering and dogs barking signal the coming of something new, here’s hoping that love and compassion are the depth and meaning of the change we seek in 2018.

Happy New Year, Everyone.

]]>https://mothlit.wordpress.com/2018/01/01/charity-2018/feed/4mothlitooT eMhttps://mothlit.wordpress.com/2017/10/28/oot-em/
https://mothlit.wordpress.com/2017/10/28/oot-em/#respondSat, 28 Oct 2017 16:23:19 +0000http://mothlit.wordpress.com/?p=609Continue reading →]]>Last week, the Internet exploded. It exploded with women’s (mostly) testimony and witness to sexual assault and harassment, a response to Harvey Weinstein and every sexual predator that ever took what was not his by force or coercion and without consent–verbal or emotional.

I hesitated to jump in. And still I’m trying to understand the fullness of why.

Of course, “Me, too.” I’ve been groped, grabbed, and pinched both in and out of the country; at nine, a middle-aged white guy exposed himself to me in broad daylight, asking me to touch his limp penis; then there was an adult event where the lines of consent were so blurred that it’s a by-someone’s-definition claim—a rape light brand of abuse.

Bottom line is this: not one of those events alone amounted to any more damage than all the social expectations of pink ribbons and Barbie dolls and 108 pounds of obsequious pandering to the male gaze. Not that that’s not damage enough, but who am I, when others HAVE suffered the unthinkable stuff—the violence of rape, suicide attempts, victim blame—who am I to claim space aside them with this list of comparatively trivial infractions? I ask myself, Am I not diminishing the meaning of their suffering by stepping in? To which my self answers back, Maybe. But the point is the continuum, right?

Right. The continuum… a long one that cannot be captured in its entirety by the mind and body of a woman. It is a patriarchal line of entitlement that offers men the rights of acquisition by force and without consent. It is the continuum on which a social hierarchy of power is established and maintained, the continuum of abuse that is as much about war and genocide and police brutality as it is about rape culture. It is a continuum on which the oppressed become oppressors, lining up for some tiny piece of the pie offered the beggars who play by the rules of the Patriarch, rules of domination and control.

And we the mainstream, men and women alike, are the very beggars who applaud the success of the players. We applaud their status-laden titles, their successful investments (often successful on the backs of laborers and impoverished renters), their foundations and galas, their houses, cars, and clothes. We applaud it all and we hope it for ourselves. We aspire to the status that says we, too, are important, if only a little, an attribute reserved for the “winners” of the title and acquisition contest. And because we are active and willing participants in the culture of the Patriarch, we hardly recognize the roots of our own pain and its relationship to global suffering. We storm on the surface for a day or two before the rage evaporates into the atmosphere where it will collect in clouds of confusion for another surface run, another day.

And the whole world plays.

I’m tempted here to look at other atrocities in the world, each one a reflection of the patriarchal values implicit in “Me, Too.” I want to speak of acid burn victims, mutilated clitorises, poverty, sex trafficking, child brides, child soldiers, child labor, environmental rape… because each one of those abuses is a product of the patriarchal standards of entitled acquisition and control and much of it perpetuated by consumers and rapists in this country and other developed nations. But I keep having to re-learn the fact that mostly people don’t give a shit until the abuse taps on the door of those a little higher up the ladder. Don’t misunderstand… I’m grateful for the women who finally blew the whistle on Harvey Weinstein, but black women were the beginnings of the “Me Too” movement some ten years ago and virtually ignored by all but themselves until white women of celebrity reached the limits of their use for the likes of Weinstein. Black women weren’t quite the sensation, and our willingness to ignore that which we now rail against is itself a symptom of the Patriarch and its power structures.

And there are levels of power between white women as well.

In the spring of my older son’s 5th grade year, I considered opting him out of the state standardized test (Yes, standardized testing is another symptom of the patriarch—acquisition, dominance, control, all of it). I was watching as DPS began dismantling schools based upon test scores, each of the school closures serving students of color. I’m not a big fan of standardized tests in the first place, but to use them as an excuse to disrupt communities, rendering them absent the resources to help children thrive, then shutting the doors of the very institutions that should be the hub and heart of a community seemed unforgivably immoral to me. (School-to-prison pipeline, anyone?) How could I allow my son to be a pawn in that game?

As murmurings of my intentions reached the community of more privileged white mothers, the talk began: “She’s going to hurt our school,” and “What about the teachers? They sacrifice so much. She could hurt their potential for a raise,” and this one was direct, “You’re doing this alone. No one’s going with you, so what’s the point?” And on an afternoon when I was talking to my then husband about my frustrations and what to do, he said, “Jan, we’re not the movers and shakers of the world. It’s not our place.”

“Then what are we supposed to do? Plant our gardens, install granite countertops, and look the other way?”

“Pretty much.”

And I don’t fault him. He spoke the absolute truth of the system that rules us.

My son took the test. He scored “Advanced” in both reading and math, “Proficient” in writing, and he took his place on an academic hierarchy that simultaneously relegated others to places above and below him. And I took my place as a silent bystander of white middle-class privilege; it is the law of the Patriarch.

We can keep medicating symptoms with aspirin. After all, pain relief is, well… relief. But it is temporary, and in one form or another, the disease of the Patriarch will keep coming back. Until we say that we would rather create than acquire, we would rather connect than control, we would rather share than dominate, nothing will change.

So perhaps we should stop rewarding the beneficiaries of the Patriarch. Screw the NFL and Hollywood and granite and shopping malls. Turn off the TV and all the rest of the noise and make something—a donation, a friendship, a poem, a conversation. Risk saying something for which you will get not one “like” or “share.” Consider opting OUT of the system that is killing us all.

]]>https://mothlit.wordpress.com/2017/10/28/oot-em/feed/0mothlitReading the Tarothttps://mothlit.wordpress.com/2017/07/30/reading-the-tarot/
https://mothlit.wordpress.com/2017/07/30/reading-the-tarot/#commentsSun, 30 Jul 2017 18:29:57 +0000http://mothlit.wordpress.com/?p=600Continue reading →]]>As late as high school, my older son’s ambition was to be President of the United States. In fact, under the heading “Objective” on his high school resume for Starbucks, he wrote something like, “I’m going to be the first gay president of the United States, but in the meantime, I would consider it a great privilege to serve coffee in your establishment.” He got the job. I can’t remember when the change of heart came, if it was before he graduated high school or after, but at some point months or years later, he told me that he wouldn’t be running for president after all, and that it wasn’t the harsh reality of his financial pedigree that was the problem. Rather, he said, “I can’t get there without selling out. No one can.” I wonder, in those moments of reflection, what thoughts he entertained. Did he consider that maybe he himself was capable of selling out the very humanity he hoped to serve? Best not to take even one step in that direction? I wish I’d asked more questions.

Don’t laugh. I read Tarot cards—my own. Not for employment or relationship status or time-of-death predictions, but for a shot of insight or perspective. Appropriately, the name of my deck is The Intuitive Tarot with the subtitle, Unlock the power of your Creative Subconscious. Yes, please.

Recently I’ve taken to the card-a-day habit that’s supposed to guide my reflective thoughts as I negotiate the moments between the rising and falling of the sun. A couple days ago, I drew THE DEVIL who had this to say: “Each one of us has the capacity for evil. We usually try to avoid this unpalatable fact. However, the Shadow is an indivisible part of humanity and cannot be destroyed, though it can be transmuted. By accepting our darkness as an integral part of ourselves, we fully accept our human responsibility. However, if we deny it, we end up projecting it out onto other people or situations. Thus we give it power, and its divisive energy becomes ever more entrenched, the resulting flak growing ever darker.”

It’s hard to speak for everyone’s shadow, but here’s a little Freud on the nature of the id:

“It is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality… We approach the id with analogies: we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations. …It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but it has no organization, produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle.”

It is fear, it is anger, it is chaos, and it produces no collective will. It hears naught but itself and tantrums its pleasures at being “right,” screaming condescensions that will change no one, appealing to its own choirs and shielding its own fragile ego with the honors and accolades of those of similar mind and characteristic. Not exactly progress.

In the months leading up to the November election, I was tantruming aplenty. Fear, chaos… lots of that childish “id” business. But sometime in the final weeks, I entertained a few moments of clarity when I understood that my anger and arrogance wasn’t changing anyone, and on one occasion, when I was reading commentary on a site I knew to be corporately motivated, I tried a different approach. I don’t remember the exact context of the “discussion,” but I know the commentary was full of hate and anger, so when I stepped in, I made sure my response to one of the commenters was respectful and followed it with a reasonable question. The person responded in like tone and the conversation was off. Until it was stopped. At a few turns in, the moderators removed the thread. I was stunned and a little embarrassed. Perusing all the vitriolic comments that were posted and apparently “legal,” it made no sense. Who had we threatened? What was it about a polite conversation that might be cause for concern? I can’t be certain, but it’s reasonable that if the 99% who suffer at the hands of the 1% ever learned to talk to each other, there’s no doubt but that the one percent would lose ground. They win as long as we hate.

But I can’t possibly talk to those ignorant Trump bigots. Let me ask the righteous among us a few questions, myself included. Have you studied up on mass incarceration and the Jim Crow motivation behind it? Have you considered how you might be profiting by it? If you’re aware, have you taken any meaningful action? We liberals love to talk. Have you looked at your investments? Your retirement? Do you know for sure that the boost in your returns since Trump took office isn’t, in part, the boom in the privatized prison industry? If you choose to remain ignorant and complacent in the face of racist systems of injustice, are you not somewhere on the spectrum of racist? And what about any of your recent purchases… Do you read labels and consider the slave labor around the world (mostly brown) that produced it? Do you think about children in Africa who’ve been turned into murderers and laborers for kingpins protecting and amassing minerals for the electronics industry that keeps us spinning with a gluttony of gadgetry? You might think about the ways you profit on the backs of brown people and ask again if you are racist. I am. And the not-as-much argument is futile. The bottom line is we hurt people with our ignorance and apathy, and yes, each one of us is capable of selling out for our own gain. We do. Every day. But self awareness gives birth to humility and the potential for change. Without it, we are, as Freud said, entrenched… and, perhaps ironically, fodder for profit.

In an age of Trump, it becomes all too easy to wave our righteous banners at the orange-haired fool, the bigot, unleashing the racist masses, making good on his business dealings at the expense of the American people. With a virtuous fist, we rail against the Trump brand and the ignorant voters who gave him to us as if the election happened in a vacuum that can assign guilt to a single electorate. Our righteous fervor, ill-informed of the darkness that lurks beneath it, becomes a synthetic filling to the holes in our own humanity, holes created by a capitalist economy that thrives on pitting humans against each other in a battle of superlatives that becomes the lies of status and entitlement. They are the lies that deliver to us our value as it exists by comparison on a social ladder perpetuated by its profiteers and blinding us to the reality of ourselves, an understanding, without which, I am convinced, we will never be of enough love for ourselves or anyone else.

]]>https://mothlit.wordpress.com/2017/07/30/reading-the-tarot/feed/2mothlitGardening, Farming and Net Neutralityhttps://mothlit.wordpress.com/2017/07/07/gardening-farming-and-net-neutrality-2/
https://mothlit.wordpress.com/2017/07/07/gardening-farming-and-net-neutrality-2/#respondFri, 07 Jul 2017 19:22:13 +0000http://mothlit.wordpress.com/?p=596Continue reading →]]>This is a re-post of a piece I wrote in 2014. Given recent events, it is as relevant and concerning as it was then–maybe more so. Please consider taking action at the link in the 2017 Update.

Inevitably we look upon society, so kind to you, so harsh to us, as an ill-fitting form that distorts the truth; deforms the mind; fetters the will.

Three Guineas. Virginia Woolf, 1938.

This morning I rose with the dawn to spend a little time inspecting all the greens that emerged after the Mother’s Day snowstorm and several days of heavy rain. Surprises abound. I had no idea, for example, the fertile potential of the woolly lamb’s ear. Those silvery lobes now don every open space of my herb and grass garden, as well as the cracks of an elder “patio” (actually the concrete slab that remained after the original garage burned sometime in the 70s). Arugula is similarly prolific while the blue sage sits square in its original earthy pocket, pushing infant greens through the stiffened gray stalks of last season’s growth. Of course there are weeds… lots and lots of weeds, and too many spaces that require something altogether new and different if I am to create the dream garden of my imagination.

It’s overwhelming.

And waving the white flag of surrender earlier in the month, I headed to the Internet to begin a search, sustainable urban landscaping, which offered up the local fare that appeals to my economic convictions—specifically, a site called Urban Roots. A phone call and a lovely conversation with Susanne who assured me that we could come up with a plan to be implemented over time and on a teacher’s salary, and we were off. But not before she told me to start collecting pictures and ideas that appealed to my gardener’s sensibilities so that when we met she could get a true feel for my needs and tastes. Back to the Internet where, studying, I realized that gardens are as varied and distinct as a Picasso is from a Renoit. Picture after picture, and I’m trying to decide on a label that might identify my tastes. For now, I’ve settled on conservative Bohemian.

But as is so often the case, I begin one search only to be taken off on peripheral side streets of other curiosities. Somewhere in that digital mound of photos was a picture of an urban farm, created on an abandoned parking lot in Denver proper. I clicked on the Feed Denver site that speaks of creating a “caring economy” while being good stewards of the earth and its gifts. From its executive director, Lisa Rogers, I learned about food deserts and false securities of provision. There were volunteer opportunities to which I signed on, so last Saturday spent the morning with tender hopeful souls (or perhaps wannabes, like me), trimming back a virtual hedge of arugula, the exact variety growing out of control in my own backyard. We plucked arugula and chard leaves suitable for sale in their little market and spared the rest for compost. All told, a perfect morning in May.

Confession: This post isn’t really about gardening OR urban farms. Though, I guess, peripherally, it is. Peripherally it’s about many, many things. It’s about coming out late and Ash Beckham and acceptance; about GMOs and Monsanto and greed; it’s about paleo dieting and apple cider vinegar; about all the stuff we question in a day and how the Internet answers those questions. It’s about Net Neutrality and what its end could mean to Internet users like me, to small businesses like Urban Roots and to nonprofits like Feed Denver.

For those who don’t know, Net Neutrality is the principle that Internet providers must offer equal access to all content without bias for or against products or websites. It keeps the Internet open and the flow of information free. But last week, the Federal Communications Commission paved the way for large cable and telephone companies like Comcast and Verizon to charge for a particular speed of travel. So… if you’re a giant corporation with vast sums of money to spend on rapid Internet speeds, your content will land with users far more quickly than, say, a local or start-up business—or a nonprofit. Imagine the implications for a surfer like me, who starts a search not knowing what’s out there or just exactly what I’m looking for. Under the new rules, chances are I might never know what’s out there. I might never have seen Urban Roots or Feed Denver. Really, how could such businesses and organizations keep up with the spending of Walmart or Monsanto? It is license for corporate favoritism and Internet discrimination. And when I think about all the small journalistic sites like Democracy Now, truthdig and truthout where I get much of my news and information, I fear for what any of us might actually “know” in the future—just exactly what Comcast and Verizon and AT&T want us to know, I suspect. For a while, the few of us who know to wait out the Internet waves, will likely do just that. But as this generation of us who understand the implications disappears, so will the spread of truth… so will any remaining legislative fairness.

That is, unless we do something.

2017 Update:

Right now, the FCC is proposing a new set of rules that would end Net Neutrality, favoring corporate servers in the ways I described above. Nonprofits like Fight for the Future, Free Press, and ACLU are gearing up for an Internet protest on July 12th. This isn’t the first round with the FCC; I wrote this little piece in 2014 when public outcry defeated the FCC Chairman’s efforts. I fear the profiteers are empowered by the current administration, and it will take more to shut it down this time around. Please take a little time to write a note and join the July 12th protest here; just follow the links. Yes, the corporations pushing this thing are big, but think about SOPA several years back; there was some big backing for that, too, but public action stopped it dead in its tracks.

We can do this. For Democracy, for fairness, for future gardeners, farmers and humanitarians… we must.

I come often to this bar to read, to write, or to hang out with friends–often a combination of the three–and as many times as memory serves, I order the same drink, a Classic Manhattan, Makers… straight up. It is a mark of the up-and-coming-ness of this bar that resting on the side of my martini glass is a black plastic skewer impaling not the chemically colored, oddly rubbered maraschino cherry of my childhood, but a Luxardo maraschino named after the family that produced it, Italians growing their own Marasca varietal and stewing the fruit to syrupy perfection in naught but sugar and cherry juice. I could eat a whole jar.

But to be clear, as much as I love this martini, these cherries, and the consistent kindly faces that shake and pour, the image associated with the long-stemmed inverted cone does not belong to any identity I have attempted to conjure for myself in the last ten to fifteen years. In fact, I have worked hard to distance myself from the country club wedding, the silk taffeta dress that bore its likeness, and its matching trajectory of the house, picket fence, two cars, two kids, and a dog (substitute cat). I’ve wanted no one to look at me and think I am emblematic of the American Dream and the empty material quest it suggests.

I win. No one does.

I have been going to church. And I’m still processing that reality. A committed agnostic (oxymoron?) for the better part of the last twenty years who’s shown little shame in mocking the hard-core religious, I find myself slinking around avoiding eye contact like someone guilty of a sleazy adulterous affair. In fact, until coming clean the last couple weeks, I lied to friends who asked me to go hiking or grab some coffee on Sunday mornings: “Can’t. Gotta work.” And to make matters worse, this church I’m attending boasts all the pageantry and choral frills of any southern mega-church, the most likely recipient of my sarcastic venom. So how is it that I’ve come to this most unlikely of places?

The start of it was a gal. Through my lens, an exceptionally beautiful gal—sweet silver spikes, soft cheeks, unpretended eyewear fronting a gaze that speaks of history… of time. Trust me, if you were a lesbian, you’d go to church for her, too. Although, I have to say, I met her a year earlier, and fearful of her passion for this institution, I turned my back on any possibility of a relationship. Then approximately 300 days later, she started showing up in my Facebook feed of people I might know, and I kept thinking, Gosh, she’s beautiful… Maybe I should re-think this church thing. Oh, the snares of physical attraction.

I threw the “Friend” request.

We met again, dated briefly, and to her credit, she never pushed me into her beliefs. But in an effort to understand, I put my hands on a book… This Thing Called You by Ernest Holmes, founder of the Science of Mind movement.

In the book, Holmes lays out the foundational beliefs of the movement—that is, God (Source, Energy, Spirit, Creative Intelligence… You) as the Source of all that exists must necessarily exist within all of creation—all of humanity. By extension, all source material that is of God, is of each one of us. God has made you out of Himself. The only material He had was the substance of His own being. The only mind He had to implant in you was His Mind. The only spirit He had to impart was His own Spirit, and citing Ralph Waldo Emerson, Holmes writes, Every man is a doorway… through which the Infinite passes into the finite, through which God becomes man, through which the Universal becomes individual (4) (Note: copyright 1948… forgiven the masculine emphasis). It’s all lovely to think about… I get it.

But then ISIS and Donald Trump… and of perhaps more immediate import to me personally, six break-ups in four years. Little wonder my thoughts, ultimately, lighted here: If God created you after His own nature (and there is nothing else He could have made you out of), then the thing you are after is already here, within you. The only things that stand between you and it are the accumulated thoughts, beliefs and emotions of the ages (11).

The things that stand between…

No doubt there are a gazillion—some resting so deeply in subconscious activity I may never access them though I’ll spend a lifetime trying. But the thing that has me churning just now is this business of conjuring images—that, as opposed to living the ones we are gifted. Listen to many, especially the self-proclaimed sage among us, and they describe people with titles, announce their associations with the prominent in their communities, ask, in some way, that we arrest our own thinking because, after all, this person of greater import must surely think better, deeper, more original thoughts than we. Said Emerson, I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions (35). True that. And I find it not so hard to believe that we have the likes of Donald Trump vying for position on the national stage. We’ve not only invited him to that stage through the windows of our obsession with acquisition and status, we’ve invited his very existence and simultaneously the anger of a population like ISIS who watched their people decimated by American imperialism in their own Iraqui homes. Not a justification, just a truth… a cause and an effect.

But status seeking isn’t really my problem—I’ve long been appalled by it… even a little sad and embarrassed for people who openly play in those waters. My problem is that I’m so disgusted by it, that I’ve worked to create its opposite image in my life. And what I’m understanding now is that in so doing, I’ve rendered myself equally false. It is an ego attachment—a capitulation still in that it is a personal reaction that blinds me to the truths of myself and the authentic possibilities of the present moment.

About six years ago when I was looking to purchase a house, my realtor kept trying to push me into more debt in more upwardly mobile neighborhoods. She commented on the degradation of chain-link, insisting on the primacy of redwood seclusion and the aesthetic such fencing provided a neighborhood. I wanted to puke in her shoes. Instead, I made myself a big enough pain in the ass that she let me out of the contract I’d signed with her, after which I sought out my chain-link haven to make my claim. And that’s all fine and dandy… the simplicity actually does fit some of the stuff most authentic to my being. But the myth that I’m somehow a better human being for that choice is built upon the same libel as social climbing. Better than is the American-Trump lie—the libel of the ages, those “accumulated thoughts, beliefs and emotions” that suffocate and distract me from the truest aspects of myself—the stuff that would draw the very things I most need and want in my life. There is no better than or worse than… only more or less of who we really are.

I have a favorite Christmas story, A Wish for Wings that Work, and I’m about to reduce Holmes and Emerson to its meanings. It’s my blog… I get to do that. This is an Opus story; you may recall the comic strip of Berkeley Breathed’s creation and the little penguin who is its star. In the story, Opus is feeling pretty lousy for his lot in life… to have wings that can’t do for him what they do for others in the fowl community. So he writes this letter to Santa asking for wings that work. As fate would have it, Santa’s sled malfunctions on Christmas Eve over the icy waters near Opus’s home. One of the snow ducks comes pounding on Opus’s door in the middle of the night, waking him to the horrors and begging for help. Of course, Opus is on it. Breathed writes this:

Down the snowy bank Opus scampered, a flash of black and white as he hit the water.

With a roar, a shimmering curtain of spray erupted behind the rushing missile. It held in the air for the longest seconds, catching the moonlight before falling.

Toadfrogs leaped!

Catfish jumped!

And Opus flew, strong and fast, through the icy water, a wonderful, roaring, graceful torpedo sailing through the darkness. He was swimming—and swimming, after all, is what penguins do best.

It is in the fullness of who Opus is—not who he thinks he should be—that Opus saves Christmas. He suspends the wish for winged prestige or perhaps some counter-culture validation to access the magic that is entirely his by birthright. And the world benefits… as does he.

If you know me or have read much of anything on this blog, you know that silver linings are oft times difficult for me to see. But uncharacteristically, I’m feeling hopeful about the year to come. Trump’s not the only one on the national stage… there are others of authenticity and seemingly genuine kindness. Holmes said, But there is nothing there that has not been put there either by yourself or the race. What has been put there can be removed (11). And as I arrest this need in myself to find external validation through a conjured identity–let go the impulse to hide martinis and churches and find, instead, the magic seed that is me and mine, I have become increasingly aware of the infinite kindness that infuses and surrounds me… infuses and surrounds us. Therein is hope.

Happy New Year, Everyone! May you find all the magic that is your birthright.

]]>https://mothlit.wordpress.com/2015/12/28/magic-seeds/feed/0mothlitThe Lupine Ladyhttps://mothlit.wordpress.com/2015/07/14/the-lupine-lady/
https://mothlit.wordpress.com/2015/07/14/the-lupine-lady/#commentsTue, 14 Jul 2015 19:23:52 +0000http://mothlit.wordpress.com/?p=554Continue reading →]]>Last month, I planted lupines–both seeds and plants–in the earth and in a concrete Italian statuary planter anchored in a new bed I’ve decided is to become a very drought-tolerant wildflower garden. I pulled the grass and weeds, turned and amended the soil, and dug a slice of earth for the edging that I hammered with stakes into the base of the trench. I planted seeds around and between the planter that I hoped would produce some spritely blue flax, mountain columbine, white cosmos, yarrow, blue penstemon, and desert marigold, and when I finished, I stood back imagining a certain fluidity to this garden… a fluidity of height and air and color that bends in a breeze and lifts to sunlight in an old-world style that speaks of joy and ease— that speaks of the simple beauty of being. That was the idea.

But then there were tornadoes and hail storms. There were plumbing problems that existed directly under those seeds for which earth and edging had to be removed and redistributed in ways that, no doubt, made perfect sense to plumbers who live by a different aesthetic—one of perfectly open, perfectly aligned sewage pipes. I am grateful for their art… and my wildflower garden is a mess.

I live in a Denver “hood.” Aurora, actually. All chain link, free-flowing weeds, plastic animal yard accoutrements, and bed-sheet curtains—not all houses, mind you, but in a ratio of approximately two to one for at least one of the aforementioned peculiarities. I moved here a couple years after my divorce, not because I had to, but because I have an aversion to debt cages and the other trappings of money and status and because I somehow imagined that a life in the hood came with a degree of anonymity; surely people here had bigger concerns than anything I might be up to on a given day, not that it’s ever much. And having lived in a couple up-and-coming neighborhoods over the last 20 years, I was over a life of good impressions and any attempt at tastely decorum. I wanted a simple space that I could make entirely my own by whatever definitions of “me” I happened to be working with. But for a number of weeks now, those definitions have rendered me a little perplexed, and a little… raw.

There was yet another break-up that turned ugly in its final hours, challenges with my seventeen-year-old son, sewage backing up in my pipes… and the U.S. Congress—its own brand of sewage—that passed Fast Track trade authority for the Trans Pacific Partnership when a handful of neo-liberals slipped in bed with Republicans because, let’s face it… humanity just hasn’t been fucked enough by the corporate greed represented in trade treaties. All ugly. So for days, I sat feeling sorry for myself (and others), scrolling up and down my Facebook feed in a mind-numbing stupor of “likes” and incompatible images (cute animals, modern-day slavery, ruthless politicians, glorious sunsets…)—my own postings a similar barrage of conflicting meanings and tones—and I speculated that there might be some calculable relationship between FB and Xanax sales.

Many years ago when I’d just begun teaching middle school, I had a student ask me a question about the movie Schindler’s List. Her question, relative to a tragic scene at the start of the film, was why had the director given color to a little Jewish girl in a red coat while all else in the film was in black and white. It was before I’d learned to answer such questions with Why do you think, so I poured forth with my own interpretation of what Spielberg might have been after. I told her that I imagined it was the director’s way of calling our attention to an individual. Because as human beings it’s easier to ignore or to minimize the suffering of a mass of humanity than it is to ignore the suffering of six million individuals. He called out the singular then asked the audience to multiply.

I seem to have been gifted the opposite problem. My active imagination can (and does) produce lots and lots of individuals. So, for example, when I read that the Trans Pacific trade deal included a clause that would prevent participating countries from utilizing labor in countries of known trafficking, and that Obama moved to strike one of the most offending countries (Malaysia) from the list so as to allow wealthy corporations to continue exploiting those labor markets, I saw individuals. My imagination was pushed along by an image in the article of a mass grave, fresh wooden boxes lined side by side, inhabited by the bodies of Rohingya migrants. In one of those boxes I saw a mother who, the day before, yelled at her teenage son for driving too fast and running a stop sign; in another, one who’d come out late in her years and wished in the second half of her life to find love that was eternal and kind; and in yet another, a woman who longed to pass time sitting in a swing watching cosmos and flax sway in the gentle breezes of a yesteryear. Of course, those are not their stories, they are mine. But I hold this belief that until we see all of humanity as our own and stop pushing a mass of injustice into a corner we cannot see and with which we refuse to make eye contact, we only propagate the seeds of ugliness and unkindness in this world.

Their opposite value–beauty–represented by the lupines in my planter and the only plant-life surviving the plumber’s mission. The lupines were to create a purposeful contrast to the other tall and lanky stems that curl easily around winds. Lupines are squat and full, lower to the ground with a stable center of gravity and a reminder of a beloved children’s story, Miss Rumphius. The story follows a woman who travels through her life fulfilling promises she’d made to herself and to her grandfather when a child. To herself she promised to visit distant lands then come home to live by the sea. And to her grandfather, she promised to do something to make the world a more beautiful place. It isn’t until the end of her life that she imagines what that beauty might be, but after an extended illness, where she’d watched lupines growing outside her bedroom window, she birthed her plan to spread the flowers across the countryside. As the seeds bud and bloom, Miss Rumphius comes to be known as the Lupine Lady.

The lupines, of course, are metaphor—metaphor that asks me to define what it is that beauty means to me. And ever obedient to the voices that inform my life through story and song, I begin calling out the pictures that can only begin to answer that question. I know, for one, that beauty is my sons who run stop signs and forget to text when they’re going to be late; it is Eva Cassidy singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow, and a friend who is ever present in my life to listen and to go to concerts where we lose ourselves on waves of soulful blues; it is an ex-girlfriend turned sweet, sweet friend, and a valley of wildflowers caught between ancient pinnacles and ridged contours; beauty is marriage equality and fair trade and it does not exist in anonymity, one of the ugliest lies I tell myself.

But as far as images go, I’m quite certain my most recent and vivid picture of beauty comes from an evening a little over a year ago. I was out on a date of sorts though in a group setting with my date’s friends. We sat on the patio of a Mexican restaurant with a live band and the banter of playful conversation during which the woman I was with reached out across the table to take the hands of her friend in a gesture of loving friendship. It wasn’t quick, something the group might miss if attention was drawn elsewhere; their affection lingered in cupped hands for several minutes. A gay woman and a gay man, it was bold and tender and absent any agenda, and the image of those tender hands grew over the year and became the beauty I wish for still—beauty that is this young girl’s promise to her grandfather… the hands and eyes of humanity reaching across oceans and continents to migrants in Malaysia and elsewhere to say, You, too, are my friend.